Perceptive readers of BlackBerry Cool will notice that we’ve been allaboard the WiMAX train lately, even though BlackBerry Wi-Fi is still very nascent. That’s why we’re excited by news coming from Parks Associates, who have forecasted that Mobile WiMAX will connect 8% of the world’s 1.1 billion mobile broadband subscribers in the year 2000… and 12. That’s about 88 million subscribers worldwide, for the folks keeping score at home. Parks Associates also reported that 52% of these subscribers will derive from Asia, with the Americas accounting for another 28%.

“Today, most existing WiMAX deployments are the province of aspiring start-up service providers or incumbent telecom carriers looking to fill coverage gaps,” said Yuanzhe (Michael) Cai, Director of Broadband and Gaming, Parks Associates. “The imminent availability of commercial products and increasing availability of spectrum around the world will change the market for mobile WiMAX and make it viable among major service providers. Taiwan alone will have eight million mobile WiMAX subscribers by 2012.”

Of course, WiMAX isn’t the only mobile broadband technology strutting its stuff on the world’s stage. PA’s report also states that approx. 160 million cellular subscribers, 6% of all cellular subscribers, were using a mobile broadband service by the end of 2006. What were they using? UMTS (2/3 of subscribers) and EVDO (1/3). PA’s Yuanzhe Cai also had some interesting things to say about mobile WiMAX’s impact on these technologies, specifically EVDO.

“Both mobile WiMAX and UMTS/HSDPA technologies will gain market share in the next several years, at the expense of CDMA EVDO,” Cai said, “TD-SCDMA will also have a meaningful market share due to its strong foothold in China, the largest mobile market in the world.”